Ancient ponds which date back some 6,000 years ago are rapidly drying up due to the effects of the global warming, a new study has shown.

The lakes and the ponds, situated on the east coast of Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, formerly the Northwest Territories of Canada, have a long history behind, some of them having formed around 6,000 years ago. But Canadian researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, who have been monitoring their evolution for the past 24 years, were stunned to find exactly a year ago that most of the ponds had completely evaporated, while the remaining ones were still “waiting” for their last centimeters of water to disappear.

"We were surprised. We arrived in early to mid-July and the ponds we had been monitoring were dry. Some of them had dried up completely. Some were just about to lose the last remaining centimeters of water," said Marianne Douglas, director of the Canadian Circumpolar Institute at the University of Alberta.

"It's really interesting to see how quickly it is happening. We could see this trend had started a while ago but at no time did we expect it to accelerate," said Douglas, whose work appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers blame global warming for the vanishing ponds, which also threatens birds’ habitat and animals’ sources of water.

Douglas said a study of the fossilized sediments in these pools of water- which are less than 6.6 feet deep- showed climate changes beginning as long as 150 years ago.